Eugen Saenger conceived of a winged spaceplane while a doctoral candidate at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. His 1933 Silverbird concept was for a Mach 10 glider that would cruise at 160 km altitude. The aircraft was to have a spindle-shaped fuselage and low aspect ratio wedge wings. Saenger published Techniques of Rocket Flight' privately in late 1933. By 1934 he had refined the design to a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle. It would have a hypersonic L/D ratio of 5.1, reach a top speed of Mach 13 at burnout of its rocket motor, and then enter a 5,000 km long glide, reaching a stable Mach 3.3 cruise at 50 km altitude. By the end of the 1930's Saenger had refined the Silverbird aerodynamics to a flat-bottomed, half-cone slender body, with a hypersonic L/D of 6.4 and a subsonic L/D of 7.5. The final refinement to the design was his 1944 report Concerning Rocket Propulsion for Long-Range Bombers, which featured a spaceplane 28 m long with a 15 m wingspan and 100 tone take-off mass. The glider would reach a top speed of 21,800 kph and have a range of 23,400 km.

Dynasoar American manned spaceplane. Cancelled 1963. The X-20A Dyna-Soar (Dynamic Soarer) was a single-pilot manned reusable spaceplane, really the earliest American manned space project to result in development contracts. More...

Winged In the beginning, nobody (except Jules Verne) thought anybody would be travelling to space and back in ballistic cannon balls. The only proper way for a space voyager to return to earth was at the controls of a real winged airplane. More...

Saenger antipodal bomber - .
Nation: Germany. Related Persons: Saenger. Spacecraft: Dynasoar. Eugen Saenger and Irene Bredt issue their final 400-page report on the Saenger antipodal bomber - a rocket boosted skip-glide spaceplane with global range. Only 100 numbered copies are printed, and distributed to German political and scientific leaders. The futuristic scheme would have taken many years to develop and was of only academic interest to the German government. But copies of the report fell into the hands of the Americans and Russians after the war, spawning major development projects in the fifties.